An investor wants the studio behind Elden Ring to "maximise earnings" — and the dev says that's the threat

Gaming 4 min 80 sources

An activist fund is fighting to reshape FromSoftware's owner around monetisation and hard targets, while Xbox weighs a spinoff and Ubisoft shuts two more studios. One week, three versions of the same question: who gets to decide what a studio is for.

Key takeaways

An activist investor is pushing the owner of Elden Ring's studio to chase harder monetisation and measurable targets — and the studio's director says creative freedom, the very thing being squeezed, is what made it valuable.
The same pressure runs through the week: Microsoft weighs spinning off Xbox while planning layoffs, and Ubisoft shut two more studios and cut about 380 jobs.
One studio bet the other way — Guild Wars 3 will ship with no battle pass or subscription — and one-time-purchase hits like 007 First Light show that model still works.

The fight over Elden Ring’s maker

The studio behind Elden Ring spent the week defending the thing that made it famous: the freedom to make hard, strange games its own way.

FromSoftware is 70% owned by Kadokawa, a Japanese media company [67]. An investment fund called Oasis Management — which holds about 13.76% of Kadokawa’s shares — has been pushing the company for years to “fully maximise” that portfolio, and it names FromSoftware as Kadokawa’s biggest asset [67]. On June 7, Oasis published a letter urging shareholders to vote against keeping Kadokawa’s CEO at the annual meeting on June 24 [67].

An activist investor is one that buys a meaningful slice of a company specifically to force changes in how it’s run — to get more value out of what it already owns. Oasis wants Kadokawa to “narrow its publishing slate,” chase “titles with genuine scalable potential,” and set “clear and measurable KPIs” — key performance indicators, the numbers a board tracks to grade itself [67]. In plainer terms: develop more games in-house, lean harder on the proven hits, and measure everything.

Some players will know Oasis from 2014, when it floated the idea that Nintendo should charge $0.99 to make Mario jump higher [67]. It wasn’t a literal demand, but it captured the lens: every part of a game is a place revenue could be extracted.

FromSoftware’s president and Elden Ring director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, answered carefully. He said the studio can “freely create the games we want to make without excessive interference,” and that this environment is “one of the major sources” of whatever value it has made for players [67]. He’s describing the exact thing the optimisation pressure would squeeze.

Xbox: spin it off, or cut it down

Microsoft is weighing what to do with a gaming unit that hasn’t paid off the way it hoped. The Information reported the company has considered spinning Xbox out — as a wholly owned subsidiary, a joint venture, or a structure that would make the business easier to sell [56]. Microsoft already runs LinkedIn and GitHub this way [56].

The backdrop is a string of misses. Microsoft’s bet on subscriptions and cloud gaming didn’t offset falling console sales and a shortage of big new titles [56]. Days earlier, Bloomberg reported Xbox is planning major layoffs next month, plus deep cuts to marketing [6][23]. The new gaming CEO, Asha Sharma, has approval to spend more on top-tier development of franchises like Halo and Fallout — even as the rest of the unit braces for cuts [56]. Analysts read the “reset” warning as a signal of studio shutdowns and possibly more ad-funded subscription tiers [13].

It’s the same shape as the FromSoftware fight, viewed from the parent’s side: a business judged against the return it produces, with the people and the slower bets treated as costs to trim toward the number.

Ubisoft keeps shrinking

Ubisoft made the cost side concrete. This week it confirmed the closure of two studios and the restructuring of a third, with around 380 people expected to lose their jobs [2][5]. It follows a year of repeated cuts across the company [5].

These are people, not a line item — teams in places like Winnipeg and Belgrade told a project is over. A studio doesn’t close because it ran out of ideas. It closes because the owner decided the team cost more to fund than it was expected to return. That decision gets made on a spreadsheet, by people who rarely meet the team.

A studio that said no to the squeeze

Against all this, one studio drew the opposite line. ArenaNet, building Guild Wars 3, said the game will ship with no battle pass and no subscription. A battle pass is a paid track of rewards that nudges players to keep grinding so the purchase doesn’t feel wasted — a steady drip of revenue from the same people. The studio head said they won’t “hold their time hostage” [47][58].

It’s a clean statement of the choice underneath the week’s news: a studio can be run to extract the most from each player, or to keep them around because they want to be. Those two paths produce different games — and the second is harder to defend to an investor holding a KPI sheet.

The quieter counter-evidence

Here’s the part the optimisation logic tends to skip: single-purchase games still work. IO Interactive’s 007 First Light sold 3 million copies in under two weeks, and the studio says it’s tracking well above forecast and expects to be profitable — a normal game you buy once, no live-service tail required [24]. Crimson Desert passed 6 million [31].

None of that fits the story that says the only sustainable model is to monetise players forever. It’s a reminder that “maximise earnings” and “make something people want to buy” aren’t always the same instruction — and that the second one built FromSoftware in the first place.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The thing the spreadsheet can't see is usually the thing that was working

When you optimise a thing for the number you can measure, you tend to spend the part you couldn't measure — and that part was often the whole reason it worked.

A studio defends the thing it can’t put on a sheet

An investor wants the company that owns FromSoftware to “maximise earnings.” Set clear targets. Lean on the proven hits. Measure everything. It sounds like ordinary good management.

The studio’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, answered with something stranger. He said the games are good because the team gets to “freely create the games we want to make without excessive interference.” That freedom, he said, is “one of the major sources” of the value they’ve made.

Read those two positions side by side. The investor is naming a number to grow. Miyazaki is naming a condition that produces the number — and warning that the plan to grow it would damage the condition. He’s not arguing about the goal. He’s saying the goal and the means point in opposite directions.

When the measure becomes the target

There’s a quiet rule for this, and it’s worth carrying. When you turn a measure into a target, the measure stops telling you the truth. People — and companies — start optimising the number directly, and the number drifts away from the thing it was supposed to stand for.

A test score was meant to track learning. Make the score the goal and schools start teaching the test; the score climbs while learning doesn’t. “Hours logged” was meant to track work. Make it the target and people sit at desks looking busy. The number rises. The real thing underneath quietly leaves.

FromSoftware’s value was never the revenue line itself. It was a harder-to-name thing: a team trusted to make difficult games their own way, which produced games no committee would have greenlit, which sold tens of millions because they were unlike anything else. The revenue was a symptom of the freedom. Aim straight at the revenue — narrow the slate, chase scalable hits, monetise the jump — and you’re aiming at the symptom while spending the cause.

Why the cause is always the part that gets cut

The cause gets cut because it doesn’t defend itself on a spreadsheet.

You can put “Elden Ring sold X million” in a cell. You cannot put “the team felt free enough to spend three years on a brutal, obtuse idea no focus group asked for” in a cell. One is a number. The other is a condition — slow, soft, deniable. When someone with a KPI sheet looks at the studio, the freedom reads as inefficiency, not as the engine. So it’s the first thing offered up to the optimiser, because it’s the thing that looks like slack.

This is the same shape running through the rest of the week. Ubisoft closed two studios and cut about 380 jobs — teams that looked, on a sheet, like cost. Microsoft is weighing whether to spin off Xbox or trim it toward whatever returns best. In each case the spreadsheet sees clearly what can be counted, and is blind to what can’t. The blindness isn’t a flaw in any one executive. It’s built into the instrument. A measure can only show you what it measures.

The other studios reading the same lesson

Watch who’s drawing the opposite line, and why. ArenaNet said Guild Wars 3 will ship with no battle pass and no subscription — no paid track quietly nudging you to keep grinding so your money doesn’t feel wasted. The studio head’s words: they won’t “hold their time hostage.”

That’s a bet that the unmeasured thing — players who stay because they want to, not because a meter is bleeding them — is worth more than the revenue you could squeeze in the short run. And there’s evidence it isn’t naïve. 007 First Light sold 3 million copies in under two weeks as a game you buy once, no forever-monetisation attached. Crimson Desert passed 6 million the same way. The “extract more from each player” model isn’t the only one that pays. It’s just the one that’s easiest to defend in a number.

You are inside this, not above it

It’s tempting to read this as a story about distant executives making a category error you’d never make. But the move is human, and you make a version of it constantly.

The hobby you started for pleasure, the moment you begin tracking your pace, your streak, your output — and the pleasure that was the point quietly drains while the metric climbs. The friendship you keep because it’s useful. The reading you turn into a count of books finished. Every time you reach for the part you can measure, you risk spending the part you couldn’t — and the unmeasured part was often why you were there at all.

And you’re downstream of other people’s version of it. The games you love exist because, somewhere, someone resisted the instinct to optimise the unmeasurable into a line item — or didn’t, and the studio that made the thing you loved is gone. You don’t see those decisions. You see the result on a store page, long after the meeting where the spreadsheet won or lost.

That’s the humbling part. Not that the number is bad — you need numbers; you can’t run a studio or a life on vibes. It’s that the number can never hold the whole thing, and you can’t always tell, from inside, which part of what you’re optimising is the symptom and which part is the cause. So hold the metric a little more loosely. Before you cut the thing that looks like slack, ask whether it might be the engine.

03 · Lab · your turn

Run the Studio

Rehearse trading an unmeasured engine for a measured number, and feel which one decided the ending.